Biofuels and Marginal Lands: Interrogating the Land Use Change Impacts of Jatropha Promotion in South India

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• Dr. Jenn Baka, Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Sciences
• Tuesday 28 January 2014, 13:00-14:00
• Seminar Room.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Elizabeth Blanchard.

In this talk, Dr. Baka will examine the micro-level land use impacts of India’s National Biofuel Program, which restricts cultivation to ‘wastelands’, an official government classification of marginal lands. Through field work in South India using an industrial and political ecology framework, she finds that India’s wastelands are not exactly marginal: their existing land usage provides approximately three to 10 times more useful energy than would the country’s proposed biodiesel system. She also finds that the process of defining, classifying and developing wastelands, a government-sponsored program that began in the late 1970s, is an inherently political process that obscures local land use practices. Collectively, these factors have helped facilitate ‘land grabs’ in rural Tamil Nadu, a process that is dispossessing land users/owners and decreasing the ability of agrarian communities to self-provision.

This talk is part of the Political Ecology Group meetings series.

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• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• Department of Geography
• Seminar Room

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